


blood i bled

by griffenly



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-11
Updated: 2015-07-11
Packaged: 2018-04-08 18:16:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4315365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/griffenly/pseuds/griffenly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bellamy goes after Clarke in the aftermath of Mount Weather.</p>
            </blockquote>





	blood i bled

**Author's Note:**

> So, basically, this was based off of the stuff from SDCC that talked about the time jump and Bellamy going after Clarke (obviously) and Bellamy being bitter, so here it is. I hope you all enjoy!

Murphy comes back in a daze, with words of madness tumbling from his chapped lips, pleas falling down at Bellamy’s feet as though searching for absolution. Something about _Jaha_ and _fucking crazy_ and _ALIE_ and he doesn’t understand a single word of it.

He can’t even begin to make sense of this longer-haired, sun-stained Murphy, and he tells Abby and Kane as much when they meet.

“He can’t be trusted,” Bellamy argues, running a hand through his hair as he paces back and forth, the elder two standing across from him at the round table and watching. “I _know_ him, and he’s pulled shit like this before. How do we even know he’s telling the truth? Abby, you said yourself he’s dehydrated and halfway to delirium.”

“Yes, I did,” she relents, and her tone is placating. “But, Bellamy… We saw how Thelonius was when he left. He wasn’t in his right mind. And you trusted Murphy then, so why not now?”

 _Because he let Finn murder eighteen people in cold blood, and that started us off on this train of devastation_ , he wants to say. _Because he watched Finn murder eighteen people in cold blood, and that turned Clarke away._

But he doesn’t say that. Instead, he sighs heavily, bracing both his hands on the table and glaring at the harsh metal as though it’s offended him. “I don’t know,” he admits begrudgingly. “I don’t know, but I just… I just have a feeling.” Kane and Abby are exchanging silent looks, he knows; he’s learned this about them, that they operate in a similar manner that he and Clarke do - _did_. He can read their expressions more easily than they even realize, because he had been there, once. Had been on the receiving end of many of those looks, with the words dangling between Clarke’s clear eyes. She had been a book he knew like the back of his goddamned hand. But she’s been gone for months - _three_ months, if he’s being honest with himself, because of fucking _course_ he’s counted. She’s been gone for three months, and he’s been trying to fend for himself, been trying to keep the remainder of the 44 in some semblance of order, even as Monty grapples with his violent nightmares and Raven’s leg still acts up time to time and Harper can’t stop flinching at the sound of the drills they’re using to build the cabins.

_Three months. Three months is a lifetime, down here._

He realizes a bit belatedly that Abby is speaking to him again.

“I’m sorry, what?” he asks, and Abby smiles at him. It’s not a full smile, just the slightest twitch at the corner of her mouth, and that reminds him of Clarke, too, so he has to look away.

“We…” She glances back at Kane, who nods at her. “We think that this could be something serious.”

Bellamy stares at them, understands the brevity in their gaze. He knows, he knows, he _knows_ , he was just hoping that his people would have had more time. That they could have been given break for _once_ in their goddamned lives, been allowed to grieve and heal and move on before they were shoved into another life-threatening scenario. But Abby is pleading with him, her eyes insistent and warm and so Clarke it fucking _kills_ him, and it’s then that he knows what he has to do.

“I need…” He clears his throat, standing straight up. “I’m going to go get Clarke.”

“Bellamy, I thought - ”

“It’s been three months, Abby,” Bellamy snaps, crossing his arms over his chest, thinks of the words he wants to say that are lodged in his throat. _I need her, too, damn it._ We _need her, too._ “It’s time for her to come home.”

Abby takes a deep breath, and Bellamy watches as Kane moves incrementally closer, a steady presence at her back. (He thinks of war talks and _together_ , and it tastes like iron in his mouth.) “Fine,” she sighs, “but you have to be careful.”

“Aren’t I always?” He gives her a self-assured smirk, and she glares at him - _too familiar, too real_ \- before he saunters out of the council room to go collect the necessary items.

He goes to Raven, first.

“Are you finally going after her?” she asks the minute he walks into her workshop, and he stops dead in his tracks. She rolls her eyes and gives him a lopsided grin, the closest she’s come, at least, since they’ve come home. “I was surprised you hadn’t left the minute she walked away.”

“I was trying to respect her wishes,” he grits out, clenching his hands on the work table. It’s become a habit, since he’s been back, trying to find his grip on something solid, real - it reminds him that he’s _here_ , he’s alive. It’s his tactic for remembering what’s a nightmare and what’s reality, because the two had been a bit murky, when he’d come back. (They’d found him half-strangling one of the guards one night, that first week. He didn’t like to talk about it.)

“Yeah, well, this is the more sensible option anyway,” Raven mutters, and it brings him back to the present. She’s assembling a motley of guns, “just to be safe, obviously,” she says. Bellamy thanks her and grabs the bag and begins to walk out the door before her small hand firmly grips his forearm. He looks down at her hand and then back to her face, sees the raw pain still carved into her clenched jaw, in the bloodshot lines of her eyes. “Bring her back, alright?” Bellamy hears the words she’s trying to say, in those four words - _bring her back to me, please, bring my friend back to me_ \- and he nods.

_Together._

_What did that mean to you, Clarke? What did it mean?_

He goes to grab a few ration packs after that, bumping into Monty and giving the other boy the warmest smile he can manage and clapping him on the back. He flinches, a bit, and it makes Bellamy frown. “You doing alright there, Monty?” he asks, and the younger boy nods vigorously, not making eye contact. Bellamy is ready to say something else when Miller sidles up, placing a hand on Monty’s back and leading him away. He shoots Bellamy a look that says _I’ve got this_ , and Bellamy simply nods. He stuffs a few more packs into the bag, because Christ knows when the last time was that Clarke _actually_ ate.

He shouldn’t care. It shouldn’t _matter_.

But it does. Of course it does.

He glances behind him to see Abby and Kane watching him from the doors of what was once the Ark, the doors that had once meant nothing but death and devastation to him but now meant home.

He’s going to bring her back.

* * *

 

Bellamy never realized how much he loathed the quiet until he crash-landed to Earth in a metal deathtrap. There had never been much quiet on the Ark, everything always echoing down the metal hallways, Octavia’s laughter (or her tears) reverberating around their small compartment, the gentle hum of the ship as it drifted aimlessly through space. There was always something, but when Bellamy first came to Earth, the only sounds being those made by his own two feet, it was comforting. It was a solace he had never known before.

And so now, his boots the only sound in the entirety of this expansive forest, it feels like the peace he’s been trying to find for these past three months. The woods are his haven, his break from the reality of sole leadership and nightmares that make him tremble and the whispered legends that people tell of him, the Knight of the Sky People, the Boy King who became more.

_I didn’t ask for this life, Clarke. I didn’t want any of this._

_You did once_ , her voice in his head reminds him. _You tried to own them all, Boy King_.

But he hadn’t _known_. He had been so stupid back then, with the promise of absolution carved into the bark of the trees, the promise of a life without parameters, a life where he could be the dictator of his own world - that had all sounded so wonderful and ephemeral. But now? After having led his people with her at his side, having pulled that lever with his hand on top of hers? After trying to hand her the salvation she so craved in the palms of his quaking, blood-stained hands? He didn’t want to do it alone, anymore. He was so fucking _sick_ of doing it alone.

_You did that to me. You left us all to fend for ourselves._

He doesn’t even know where he’s going, his feet moving of their own volition, one step in front of the other. It sounds like a death march. (It feels like a funeral.)

 _Of what? What’s dying, here, Bellamy?_ she whispers to him, and he wonders why he can’t get her out of his head. Why, after all these days and weeks and months of being on his own, trying to survive without her, he’s somehow still picturing her face, broken and beaten and scarred like it was on that last day. _Why is this a death, instead of a rebirth?_

_Because you left us, and the burden was too heavy for us to hold, Clarke. It crushed us._

He walks and he walks and he walks, and he eats little bits of the rations and drinks the water, and he has no idea what day it is, how long he’s been gone. He realizes, too late, that he never saw Octavia before he left. _Really, Bell? You’re going to risk your life to bring her back?_ he can picture her screaming, fire in her veins and ice in her eyes and cold, hard anger biting at his flesh as her words sink in like daggers. _She left, and you’re going to go running after her like a fucking dog?_

His mind is a prison, and all he wants is salvation.

He hears drills and he feels the slip of a needle into his arm as they turn him upside down, as the blood rushes to his head and all he can think of is the way Clarke looked when she told him _it’s worth the risk_ , when she signed his name on his death warrant with a blankness to her eyes that he’d never seen. He feels the life drain out of his body like sand through a sieve.

He wakes with a sweat lining his skin, and he thinks this may be hell.

( _Make it stop. Please, God, make it stop._ )

_Why the fuck did you think this was a good idea? You’re not even cleared to be out on patrol, for Christ’s sake._

“Shut up,” he mutters out loud, shoving his pack higher on his back and moving forward. How long has he been gone? Days, weeks? Will anyone come looking, if he never returns? How would they _know_ to come looking?

_I bear it so they don’t have to, her voice rings in his head._

_Bear what? We shouldered that burden same as you. We had our scars just like you did._

“Shut up,” he says louder, trying to stop the voices. He needs to stop the voices, needs to find the silence he felt those first few days back in the forest.

 _She left them, but she did something worse, didn’t she? She did something to_ you _._

“Shut up!” Bellamy finally screams, stopping in his tracks and clutching at his head. It’s too much, and it’s too soon, and it shouldn’t hurt this much, still, it shouldn’t feel like someone is clawing out his lungs with their talons.

“Bellamy?”

He thinks he’s hallucinating. He thinks it’s his mind playing tricks on him again, tormenting him the way it does in his nightmares: her bloody hands wrapping around his throat, her sinister smile haunting his eyes as she digs the needle further into his arm, her standing alone with her hands dripping in the blood of the fallen and a broken-hearted promise of _may we meet again_ falling from her lips like a _goodbye_ instead of a _see you later_. But she’s coming closer, now, a halo of golden light surrounding her head - of fucking _course_ it does - and a worried look marring her face. And then she’s right in front of him, kneeling in front of his body as she bites her chapped lips. He doesn’t remember falling to the ground, but there he is, on his hands and knees in the middle of the forest, and of _course_ this is the way she finds him.

(And of course _she_ finds _him._ It’s always been about her, hasn’t it?)

“Bellamy, are you alright?” she asks, and her voice is barely above a whisper, her hands hovering around her folded knees as though she wants to reach up and touch him, to make sure he’s _real_ , but she hesitates. He can’t decide if he’s grateful or disappointed.

“I’m fine,” he mutters, clambering to his feet. “But it’s time for you to come home.”

Clarke is still on the ground, a bewildered look in her eye, and he realizes her hair is shorter, shorn close to her chin. And then he notices more: there’s a new scar across her cheek that doesn’t look properly healed, and a smattering of bruises below her jaw, and she’s thinner than he remembered, much thinner. And her eyes - _Christ_ , her eyes are going to kill him. Because there’s still ghosts swarming her vision. There’s still the hesitance in her gaze that practically ripped him open when she left, all those months ago. Dark smudges stain the skin beneath her eyes, as though she hasn’t been sleeping much, if at all, and he can’t help the satisfaction that courses through him at that. _None of us have been sleeping. All of us have nightmares, too, didn’t you know?_

“Time - time for me to - ”

“Murphy showed up - ” He pauses, realizing he doesn’t actually know how long ago it was that Murphy came and delivered the news, and so he shakes his head. “It doesn’t matter. Murphy showed up, and started ranting about Jaha going fucking ballistic and about some robot woman. So you need to come back.”

Clarke stands slowly, her legs a bit unsteady. Her eyes are roaming over him, drinking in every inch, trying to relearn and rememorize. “How… how is everyone?” she asks, and Bellamy thinks he may actually combust on the spot.

“How _is_ everyone?” he repeats coldly, and his tone strikes something in Clarke because he catches the grimace that swipes over her face. “Well, let’s see. Monty still can’t look me in the fucking eye, and he flinches every time someone other than Miller tries to lay a hand on him. Harper has had to walk around with earplugs in all the damn time because she can’t stand the sound of drills. Jasper hasn’t spoken in weeks. Raven is too terrified to even leave her workspace most of the time, and it got to the point that Wick had to build her a fucking bed in there. And _me_? How am _I_ doing?” He’s rambling, now, and he knows it, but he can’t stop himself. He can feel the words bubbling up from his throat no matter how many times he tells himself it isn’t the time nor the place, no matter how many times he tells himself that this isn’t her fault.

Because it _is_ , damn it.

It’s hers, and it’s his, and it was supposed to be _theirs_ , but she ruined any chance of that the minute she turned her back on them.

“I get nightmares every night, and half the time during the day, as you noticed right here,” he spits, and Clarke has her arms curled around her stomach now, her eyes clenched closed. He sees the silent tears glistening on her cheeks, and he wonders when she became this - this broken, battered shell of a girl. “And I’ve had to lead our people alone because you fucking _left_.”

“Don’t you _dare_ , Bellamy!” she screams, and _there she is_. Her hands are now clenched into fists at her sides, and she’s literally shaking from head to foot, her lip trembling and the tears still rolling. “I did what I had to do for _me_. I took the burden so they wouldn’t have to.”

“No you fucking _didn’t_! You - you may think you were helping us or whatever, but guess what, Clarke? We were all in that damn mountain together. Monty still assembled the lever. I still _helped_ you pull that lever. And you _left_.”

“I couldn’t - I couldn’t _be_ there, I couldn’t - ”

“So you left _me_ to do it? Alone?”

“Bellamy, _God_ , I never wanted to! You think I would have just willingly left my people because I was feeling a little _guilty_? I don’t regret doing what I had to do to save them,” she snarls, moving in closer to him and jabbing a finger in his chest. “I don’t regret it for a second. But I did a lot of things that I’m not proud of. I killed a lot of people I never wanted to. Do you know what that _feels_ like?”

“Actually, Clarke, I _do_ , if you’ve forgotten. And I could have helped you, if you would have just let me,” he bites back, and he can see the sparks flying in her eyes. It shouldn’t make him this _happy_ , to see the liveliness back in her demeanor, to see her alive again.

And yet.

“It’s _different_. You couldn’t have helped me, Bellamy. And that’s not why you’re mad, I _know_ that’s not why you’re mad.”

“You’re damn right that’s not why I’m mad!”

 “Then spit it out then, damn it!”

“I’m fucking _mad_ , Clarke, because you didn’t just leave _us_. You left _me_ ,” he says, and he hates himself for the way his voice breaks at the last word. She’s staring at him, open-mouthed and wide-eyed, her shaking having intensified during their argument. Bellamy takes a step back, because their proximity is too much, it’s all just too _much_ , and he can’t fucking _breathe_.

“Oh, God, _Bellamy_ , I - ”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“Bellamy, for fuck’s sake, will you just _listen_ to me?” 

“I _tried_ , Clarke,” he whispers, and it sounds dejected even to his own ears. “I tried so damn hard, and you pushed me away. I asked - I _begged_ you to come inside, and you still turned your back on me. I said _together_ , and I meant it. But you - you just… you gave up.”

Clarke’s eyes are transfixed on a spot on the ground. She releases a shaky breath, and he sees the way her shoulders are stooped again, sees the way she can barely hold herself erect. “I’m sorry,” she murmurs, and it’s so quiet he almost doesn’t catch it. “I’m sorry that I was broken into so many pieces you couldn’t glue me back together. I… I tried to do it for myself, but I…” She stops and looks up, and their eyes meet again, and there’s such raw honesty in her gaze that he has to bite his lip to keep himself from saying something stupid. ( _I know_ , he wants to whisper to her. _I know. I know. I know._ )

He wonders if she would accept his forgiveness, now.

 _I want you to say that you’re with us_ , she had told him a lifetime ago. He wonders if she’d accept that, too.

“I… _we_ need you, Clarke. I know… I know it doesn’t feel like you can, yet, but… but we need your help.”

Clarke nods once, inhaling deeply and clenching her eyes closed for a brief moment before opening them again. She gives him a sad, sad smile, just the slightest of curves at the corner of her mouth, and she whispers, “I can give that to you.”


End file.
